http://www.startribune.com/511/story/964347.html What started out as a research project to peek at the backgrounds of the players on the Timberwolves' 2006-07 roster has become, I'll admit, a bit of a pet project. Or maybe just a crackpot theory. You be the judge. In trying to gauge the challenge facing former coach Dwane Casey and new coach Randy Wittman in building a consistent winner, it seemed worthwhile to check the resumes of the players. Do they know what it takes to win? Have they won elsewhere? Or have they been stuck unhappily on mediocre (or worse) squads? Or, ugh, become inured to the notion of losing? So some diligent Star Tribune researchers ran the numbers -- adding up the won-lost records of each player's team or teams. They had to "ballpark" the results for simplicity's sake, going with a club's season record if the player spent most of that season with that team. (In other words, we didn't track only the games in which each guy played. And we used a minimum of two full NBA seasons.) Still, the pattern is interesting: Mark Madsen 319-214, .598 Kevin Garnett 489-422, .537 Troy Hudson 316-313, .502 Trenton Hassell 206-245, .457 Justin Reed 131-156, .456 Ricky Davis 340-407, .455 Mark Blount 280-335, .455 Eddie Griffin 168-201, .455 Mike James 279-336, .454 Marko Jaric 145-224, .393 Just eyeballing the numbers, it might suggest that the Wolves, who were 20-21 (.488) at the time, were about where they should have been, given their players' NBA exposure to winning and losing. Maybe it shows a blunder in building a roster with players who haven't won, then assuming they can win. You know, the old lemons into lemonade saying, silk purses and sows' ears, garbage in/garbage out, chicken salad and ... chopped liver? Then again, maybe it says nothing of the sort. Some great players, such as Kevin McHale, fall into a team that already is humming. Others, like Michael Jordan, have to do the heavy lifting themselves. Still, I'm wondering why the NBA -- and other major league sports, for that matter -- don't track the W-L marks of its players just like another individual stat. Not just the specialty positions (pitcher, goalie, quarterback) but everybody. No one thinks twice about a coach or manager lugging around a W-L record for an entire career, even though most of them necessarily start in dog situations. Why shouldn't a participant, who has more control over a game's outcome than some guy in a suit or a windbreaker, be similarly measured? There might be two dozen reasons why a team W-L record can't capture the true value of an individual. It doesn't tell us everything we'd like to know. But surely it doesn't tell us nothing about a guy. Let's get the W-Ls right out there with the ERAs, the PPGs, the INTs and the GAAs. In time, maybe the fantasy leaguers would start to dig it, too. --

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